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After Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices overturned Roe v. Wade, GOP officials at the state level did exactly what everyone expected them to do: They imposed sweeping restrictions on reproductive rights. There can be no doubt that those new policies have had dramatic effects on the lives of countless families.
But there’s always been an important catch to these state-based Republican efforts: People are free to travel, receive medical care from professionals in different states, and then return home. It’s not an option for everyone — many red-state residents can’t afford such a trip, can’t get time off of work, can’t arrange child care, etc. — but for some, these open doors are critically important.
The challenge for GOP officials, then, is figuring out how to close them.
We last discussed this a couple of months ago, as 19 Republican state attorneys general signed on to a joint letter to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, making the case for being able to access out-of-state medical records. As I explained at the time, this is a key strategy: If law enforcement officials in one state can gain access to medical records from other states — in effect, checking up on their constituents — it can lead to prosecutions for those involved.
In fact, I made the case that this is arguably the only realistic way for Republican officials to curtail out-of-state abortions, since it’s impractical to expect GOP policymakers to put up checkpoints, monitoring who’s traveling in and out of their states, asking people to explain their comings and goings.
It turns out, my assumptions about practical limits might’ve been naïve. The Washington Post reported late last week on developments in Texas, where some local officials want to prohibit transporting anyone to get an abortion “on roads within the city or county limits.”
Antiabortion advocates behind the measure are targeting regions along interstates and in areas with airports, with the goal of blocking off the main arteries out of Texas and keeping pregnant women hemmed within the confines of their antiabortion state. These provisions have already passed in two counties and two cities, creating legal risk for those traveling on major highways including Interstate 20 and Route 84, which head toward New Mexico, where abortion remains legal and new clinics have opened to accommodate Texas women. Several more jurisdictions are expected to vote on the measure in the coming weeks.
One local activist told the Post, “This really is building a wall to stop abortion trafficking.”
Ordinarily, when we think about building walls in Texas, we’re talking about barriers intended to keep people out of the state who want to enter. In this instance, however, the Post highlighted an effort to build a metaphorical “wall” in Texas intended to keep people in who want to leave.
As for the medical-records angle, Steve Marshall, Alabama’s Republican state attorney general, argued in a court filing last week that the state can prosecute people who help women travel out of state for abortions.
About a year ago, the Democratic-led U.S. House took up the Ensuring Access to Abortion Act, which would protect the right — at a federal level — to travel across state lines for abortion services. Only three House Republicans voted with Democrats in support of the measure, and two of the three retired and are no longer in Congress.
GOP members argued at the time that the proposed legislation was wholly unnecessary: There are no laws limiting Americans’ ability to travel across state lines for reproductive care, they said, so there’s no need to pass federal legislation to address a problem that doesn’t exist.
But as Republicans at the state and local level eye even more outlandish restrictions, that argument is collapsing, and the need for federal protections becomes more obvious.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.